(b) Because /o/ is generally originally from /a/—give or take some other details—a few words have the same pattern with /o/. The most common and useful of these is /poqt-/ ~ /’pqot/ ‘start, begin to…’.

poqtlugwei I start working
→ ‘pqotlugwa start working!
→ ‘pqotlugwetes I will start working

(c) Finally, a few words have a slightly quirky pattern between the e-form and the plain form. The most important of these is /wejgu-/ ~ /jugu-/ ‘coming this way/here’.

A vowel /e/ appears in the first syllable of many Mi’gmaq verbs. You will notice that this /e/ goes missing in lots of related words.

teli’si I speak (that) way
tli’si speak (that) way!
tli’sites I will speak (that) way
tli’suti language (way of speaking)

This /e/ comes in mostly for events that are real: they are actually happening, or they did. This is why they’re not used for commands or for the future, since haven’t actually happened yet. It is also pretty consistently not used for most related nouns (like tli’suti ‘language’ here), and verbs made directly/recently from nouns.

What’s more, this /e/ only comes in on words whose first syllable has the weak vowel /’/. Where the /e/ is not used, you get the original weak vowel form. But most often that weak vowel is actually dropped or left unwrittten. That lost vowel is why the /e/-less forms start with two consonants in a row, like /tl/ up above.

You will be understood most of the time if you mix up when to use the /e/-forms and when not to, but it does sound like a kid saying “I sleeped all night”. For the start, just learn to recognize it when it happens—“Oh, that had the /e/, and that didn’t”—and pretty soon you will pick up the pattern automatically.

When /l/ and /n/ come together in a word, generally the /l/ will turn into /n/: so /ln/ becomes double /nn/. Since /l/ is common ending, you will see this pattern whenever it is added to words ending in /n/.

The sound /a/ in Mi’gmaq is pronounced low and in the back of the mouth. When you add a /g/ after it, the /a/ sound pulls the /g/ down low and back into your throat, giving it that very distinctive guttural sound that we write with /q/.

(There are still some words—like jagej ‘lobster’—that do have /ag/, but as a general rule, /ag/ almost always comes out pronounced as /aq/, especially, as Erin notes, before a consonant or the end of the word.)

So for example, the common ending -g, which you may know from these two words

It’s hard to reliably hear the difference between gwu (“gwoo”) and gu (“goo”). So if putting a word together would get you /gwu/, the language naturally simplifies it to /gu/. For similar reasons, any time you might get /ugw/ at the end of the word, it can be pronounced either as /ugw/ or as /-ug/. But then if more is added to the word, the full /ugw/ will always be pronounced, since it’s not at the end any more. Same goes for /uggw/, too, so we say

One question we need to address in developing the Can-8 program is to figure out exactly what level we hope to take the learners to. And from that point: what content/structure will it take to bring them there?

So here’s the open question: what do you all think are the core grammar priorities for the Can-8 project? I.e. what specific milestones should we be setting up for core phonology, core morphosyntax, and core lexicon?